


Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

by a_walking_shadow



Series: A stained glass variation of the truth [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-10-20 23:41:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17631983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_walking_shadow/pseuds/a_walking_shadow
Summary: Everyone else lives inside their masks. In most cases, they do it so completely that they forget there's anything else.Luna isn't like that.(This story is set in the same world as my other Harry Potter story, but you don't need to read that to understand any of this.)





	Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't read my other Harry Potter story: the basic principle is, witches and wizards are a lot closer to eldritch creatures than humans... but they aren't even aware of it themselves. Last time, Petunia Evans was the only one to notice this. This time around: Luna sees way too much, because of course she does, and handles it in her usual fashion. 
> 
> The title is taken from "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats. Yes, I steal most of my titles from poetry. I like poetry.

Luna is sitting in the long grass, staring up at the sky. Remembering.

There are no clouds, just a perfect, endless blue. Well, endless until it hits the horizon, and then the grey starts staining it. Luna doesn’t like the grey very much. If she tilts her head back far enough then she loses sight of the grey, though, and she can pretend it’s nothing but blue.

Mummy always liked the blue. Her favourite spell was blue. Slightly brighter than this, she thinks, but still blue. Luna saved it, once. It had been a sunny afternoon in June, and mummy had joined her by the creek. ‘Be careful on the rocks’, she had said. Luna wishes she could save voices as well as colours. Then maybe she could have kept the lullaby, and then she could play it back for daddy.

‘Don’t be silly, mummy’, she had said. ‘I’ll be fine.’  Mummy had sighed. Luna never understood how anyone other than mummy could sigh. No one else was made of wind, after all.

She hadn’t stopped her, though, so Luna had clambered over the rocks and, because mummy was watching, she hadn’t let any of them scratch her, even though it always made the light reflect in interesting ways.  
Daddy wouldn’t have let her climb on them- at least, not back when daddy was still daddy and his pages weren’t all grey and dusty. Luna doesn’t like the grey, not one bit. Before, daddy always worried too much, like he thought that Luna was going to shatter.  
Sometimes she thinks that if she shattered now, he’d be too busy drowning in the grey to notice.  

Mummy had joined her, that day. She had drawn her wand and filled the air with lights, but soon the wind stole them all away. Mummy was always hard to keep track of, but it looked like her breezes died down to almost nothing when that happened. On her mask, her mouth turned downwards, and her shoulders curved in. Sadness, Luna decided.  
‘Why don’t you ask the air to return them?’ Mummy’s mask blinked. The wind stuttered and spun half a dozen eddies to give itself something to do. For a moment, Luna wondered if she had done something wrong.

‘I can’t do that, sweetheart. It doesn’t listen to me.’ Instinctively, Luna flickered blue-pink-grey-red. Mummy didn’t respond, though, and Luna realised she was probably waiting for the mask. Eventually, she settled for tilting her head to the side, in what the books she got from the muggle library said was a gesture for confusion. It seemed to get the message across.

‘Most people can’t do what you can, love. The rest of us can only use our bodies- the masks, that is. Most people don’t even know that there’s more.’

‘How can you not know yourself?’ Luna had asked, but mummy hadn’t answered, or if she did, she did it with her mask in a way which made no sense. Instead, she picked up her wand and let more blue dance over the surface of the water.

Luna watched for a moment, as the water captured shards of it and then let them go free. Catch and release. Catch and release. Catch and release.

Careful not to disrupt the pattern, Luna reached out, and slipped partially into the blue. Then came the tricky bit. Crystals grinding past each other, shards of glass dancing with the reflection _now,_ and _now_ , and _now-_  
She flared gold with the sun, all of her, the flickering blue captured deep within her chest. Her mask grinned, because smile meant happy, and mummy smiled back at her from behind her mask, her wind wrapped protectively around Luna’s colours.

 _Because most of us aren’t reflections_. Mummy hadn’t said that with her mask. The wind had told her, as they walked back home that day, and mummy-mask didn’t even seem to be aware of it. _Most of us can’t do what you can- see what you can- because most people don’t want to._

 _Why?_ Luna had thought. _It’s beautiful_. She skipped ahead a few steps, to where a rainbow had formed near a small waterfall, and wrapped it securely around her arm. For a moment, it held, then the colours blended into brown. She slumped, and the wind hissed laughter which might have been _I told you so_ except it was trying to be kind too.  
‘The fact that it doesn’t stay just makes it even prettier’, Luna had declared, and she didn’t try and raise the issue again, and her mother’s wind never said anything else.

 

* * *

With practiced ease, Luna slides the blue from its home where a heart should be to her fingertips, and compares it with the sky. As she thought, mummy’s spell is far brighter.

The smell of wood smoke arrives first. ‘Hello, Ginny.’

‘Hi Luna. Anything interesting happening?’

Luna considers this question, lowering her hand and returning the blue to her chest as she does so. ‘Not for me. You’re flaring though.’ It’s true. The fire that calls itself Ginny Weasley is roaring like someone has put a set of bellows to it and is huffing and puffing like the diagram of a dragon in Luna’s new book.  
Angry, Luna decides, and then she tries to match it to the mask. Ginny’s easy for that. When she’s really angry- like now- she lets the red flames surge forward into her hair, even more than usual. Luna thinks it might be like what she does, when she’s happy and uses the sunlight to turn the blonde hair of her mask into the brightest thing for miles around.

Ginny’s so angry that she’s spitting embers into the grass. It’s probably not going to do any damage, but just in case, she takes one of mask-Ginny’s hands and leads her into the stream. She’s not worried about getting burned. Glass needs more than a few seconds of red and orange fire to twist out of shape, after all.

Ginny-mask crinkles her face like a leaf curling in on itself in flames, but her fire just floats up slightly to avoid the water, so Luna doesn’t think she’s too upset at her. ‘It’s my brother, Ron. He’s gone off to Hogwarts now, and I still can’t go. Instead I’m stuck at home on the stupid farm with mum and dad.’

‘You’ll be able to go next year.’ Her fire huffs like a dragon, or maybe a steam engine. ‘That’s what mum said, too. But I want to go now.’

‘We’ll both get our chance next year’, Luna tells her. ‘In the meantime, do you want to go look for a blibbering humdinger?’

Fire-Ginny dims. ‘Not right now, Luna. I’m not really in the mood to chase after imaginary creatures. Sorry.’

‘Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t exist’, Luna replies, but rather than waiting for a reply, she distracts herself by watching the pattern of Ginny’s flames dancing across the water, a choreographed performance seen by no one but her.  

**Author's Note:**

> If it wasn't clear: Luna is, basically, entirely made of glass and crystal, and she's worked out how to pick up colours and lights from her surroundings, probably at a very young age. She sees people as they really are and regards their human forms as masks. As such, she's good at picking up on cues from their eldritch-y forms... but human interaction? Not so much. It's also why she instinctively uses colour and light to communicate more than gestures and body language- she just doesn't see things that way. 
> 
> Ginny is a fire. She was going to be more complicated, then I started writing her, and I realised that there really wasn't a better form out there. Or if there is, it's well beyond my perception. 
> 
> Pandora Lovegood was almost entirely gaseous, and *slightly* more aware of the non-humanoid stuff than the average witch, but still not on Luna's level.


End file.
